Tag: Central and Eastern Europe

Before the Second World War, German enjoyed the status of a global language on par with English, French and Spanish. It is a little-known fact that the German language’s vast geographic presence was possible only thanks to German-Yiddish speaking Ashkenazi Jews. While the Second World War destroyed German language and culture’s global status, it also meant the near-total 'extermination and stigmatisation of Yiddish language and culture.

Interview with Marci Shore, associate professor of history at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Interviewers: Kate Langdon and Jordan Luber

KATE LANGDON AND JORDAN LUBER: What does it mean to be a public intellectual in 2018?

MARCI SHORE: I can answer this only for myself. For me, it has been important to learn to speak at different registers, to reach out to different people beyond the university and beyond my own academic field. This is a kind of translation: can I express in essence the same ideas, the ones I feel it is most important to convey at a given moment, in different kinds of language? This demands a kind of empathy with the audience, a figuring out of what is and what is not self-evident at a given moment to a given group of people. And it involves taking a risk to leap out of one’s disciplinary comfort zone.

Following the First World War, a significant number of conspicuous monuments and memorials were put up in Central and Eastern Europe. More than just an attempt to come to terms with the trauma of the war, they were also a method of nation- and state-building. Consequently, it was associated with the revival or invention of traditions in order to stabilise the societies in the newly founded, re-founded or reshaped states.

The First World War was followed by the construction of mass number of monuments and memorials. In Central and Eastern Europe, however, the erection of new monuments was first preceded by the destruction of existing ones. In countries which had gained or regained their independence, symbols of the former regimes were removed from public view as they were associated with foreign rule and oppression.

Issue 1 2019: Public intellecturals

Issue 6/2018: 1918. The year of independence

In the eastern parts of the European continent, 1918 is remembered not only as the end of the First World War, but also saw the emergence of newly-independent states and the rise of geopolitical struggles which are felt until this day.

Issue 3-4/2018: Para-states. Life beyond geopolitics

Issue 2/2018: The many faces of Putin

Vladimir Putin is set to win a fourth term as president of the Russian Federation. The March-April 2018 issue takes a deeper look at the consequences of Putin’s presidency and what could eventually come after…

Issue 1/2018: The growing generation gap

Issue 6 2017: Central Asia. The forgotten region?

Central Asia is an ethnically, geographically and culturally diverse region, covering a similar land mass as the European Union. Yet, it remains one of the least familiar to the general public in the West.

Issue 5 2017: Homo Post-Sovieticus

Issue 3-4 2017: The Balkan Carousel

“The price of Europeanising the Balkans is much higher than the price of the Balkanisation of Europe,” claims Zagreb-based writer Miljenko Jergović in the opening essay to this issue of New Eastern Europe.